AHC: TR unseats Taft, 1912

Let's say TR gets the extra 70 votes at the RNC he needs to win a majority on the first ballot. What happens next? Who does he pick for Veep? Fairbanks again? Can he beat Wilson in November? How does TR's presidency turn out?
 

Cook

Banned
Can he beat Wilson in November?

Without Taft in the race and with the backing of the Republican party he’d be a shoe-in wouldn’t he?

Expect an early and strong offer to mediate in the First World War followed by intervention in the war if the offer was rejected.
 
I wish his VEEP could be Hughes, but he is also from NY... Fairbanks is a pretty good pick. Why risk it on an unknown?

Would Hiram run as a Progressive candidate?
 
No, because if Hiram ran then it would be OTL on a smaller scale all over again. Wilson could try to frame it as an ideological competition as he did to a degree IOTL- a Bourbon against a statist Progressive Republican. Or as TR put it, "rural Toryism" even though Wilson's platform more closely resembled Gladstonian Liberalism. :cool:
 
T.R. would curbstomp Champ Clark and handily beat W.W. in a general election. As for what happens next, I suppose Roosevelt spends the first two years of his presidency trying to move the nation into the war, as his cousin did with WWII IOTL. Wilson or whoever can run as an anti-war candidate in 1916 and will probably lose handily again if the allies are doing well. If T.R. dies in 1919 as he did IOTL, V.P. Hiram Johnson or Charles Fairbanks becomes POTUS. If not, T.R. runs for a third term in 1920, and the Socialists start picking up the slack from the Democrats, who continue to decline, having not held the White House since the 1880s.

Assuming that T.R. lives and rides onto another term in the White House, he probably becomes even more the stuff of legend than he is IOTL. Re-elected in 1924 before turning over the reigns of government to a new generation, retiring to his historiography and hunting. The Republicans keep the White House until 1932, when the Socialist Party has its big break, and takes over, with the Democrats becoming a rural, Southern-based party with nearly no northern representatives.
 
Roosevelt wouldn't spend the first year of his Presidency preparing for America's entry into the war. He would be inaugurated on March 4th 1913, and the Great didn't start until the summer of 1914.:p

That said, the second and third years of Roosevelt Presidency would be spent trying to prepare America for entry into the European conflict. Of course Roosevelt probably couldn't sell it that way. I'd imagine the first thing he'd do is build up the navy again. In spite of his attitudes towards the war IOTL, I'd imagine as President he'd have to be a bit more careful with public opinion. So he probably argues something like, "The only to stay out of the conflict in Europe, is to have a strong military and navy to deter against unwarranted foreign aggression." I know Roosevelt was quiet fond of the army, so it's possible that you'd see a military buildup around the same time. However I don't think he could get away with the draft as early as August 1914, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a recruitment drive. Knowing Roosevelt, I'd expect an American entry into the war around 1915. I assume that the Germans would still conduct unrestricted submarine warfare around that time period, and that some ship with American passengers would sink. And my feeling is that Roosevelt would push for war under those circumstances.
 
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